NEA: Once More Unto the Breach

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There is a very angry mood building among this country’s artists, since many feel that they are being subjected to a kind of punishment just for being artists and being in the arts. There is great concern in the arts world over the fate of the National Endowment for the Arts, not only over whether it will survive, but whether its survival will be compromised by the imposition of non-artistic standards over artists’ work.

Artists who are fearful of losing money that they definitely need and the kind of support that the NEA provides are weighing with great anguish how much they should compromise their beliefs by signing what amounts to an anti-obscenity loyalty oath--or refusing the money, which could put them under.

Unfortunately, the arts community has been very slow to respond to the insidious threats against it from the far right. When I say the arts community, I’m talking about theater, dance and opera as well as museums, all of which have operated independently and, in many respects, disregarded one another in the past.

But as we see politicians taking seriously the prepackaged letter-writing campaigns of fundamentalists, the mood among artists is getting more militant. I think we’re going to hear a lot more from artists, arts groups and their supporters. They are beginning to realize that the controversy over the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center’s exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs, which has resulted in the filing of criminal charges against the museum and its director, and that insistence on artists signing anti-obscenity oaths before receiving NEA money are not small, isolated incidents but free-speech issues that affect everyone.

Many fear that not only is the endowment in jeopardy but that the very fabric of arts institutions in this country is also being threatened. The NEA requires or induces other institutions, including private funders and state and local arts agencies, to match grants to arts organizations that cannot survive without outside support. These are institutions that are an integral part of the fabric of the artistic life of this country. They’re the cultural bedrock institutions of any community--not a Broadway show that’s a hit or a flop, not a film that comes and goes. They embody the very things that constitute the spiritual life of this country.

Art will always offend somebody. But just because the NEA happens to have given grant money to a few arts projects that some people perceive as outrageous, tasteless or offensive does not mean that you jump into legislating it out of existence. After all, over its 25-year life, the endowment has proven to be the most successful surety this country has ever taken into the full field of arts.

There always will be people who look askance at artists and decry their work for being offensive--it happened to Leonardo da Vinci and Oscar Wilde in their days. It has even happened to Shakespeare in ours, in fundamentalist areas of the country where some have declared sections of his work obscene and have excised the offending passages in textbooks.

We in the arts supported the creation of the endowments for the arts and humanities. It was clearly set out at that time that the government would have no role to play in how or what was produced by artists. No government say in the selection of projects funded was a vital point that was debated and discussed fully by Congress and the arts community. There was never any doubt that the National Endowment for the Arts would be administered by panels of arts peers and professionals who could properly evaluate a project.

Not only that, but artists or institutions applying for grants were expected to have substantial previous experience and acceptance in their artistic communities. No one could just knock on the door and say, “Hey, I’m an artist. I’d like a grant.” Every project had to have artistic validity. Those who applied for grants had to have reputation, recognition, recommendations from artists in their fields or from those who had expert knowledge of the artist and his or her work. If an institution applied for a grant, it had to be in existence for at least three years and doing work that other artists felt was worthy of NEA support.

The linking of art with pornography is a contrivance, a tactic by certain politicians to win elections. People applying for a grant from the NEA are not pornographers. Pornographers do not need government help.

If pornographers violate obscenity laws, they will be prosecuted. But attaching an anti-pornography provision to funds for the legitimate arts--on the pretext of accountability--is no answer to concerns over pornography. Pornography today is a multimillion-dollar industry that has nothing to do with museums, theaters, symphonies, opera companies, ballet companies and individual artists.

It would be tragic if the politics of our time put a chill on today’s artists. Long after all political battles have fallen by the wayside, a book, a piece of music, a ballet, a painting, a play will tell you about the time in which we are living.

Those who established the endowment to begin with knew that they were not supporting the artists, but that they were supporting art itself. The role of art is crucial to a country’s life.

The responsibility of those in government should be the protection of artists’ rights, not the elimination of them, even if they disagree with the content of artworks partially supported through NEA funding. When arts institutions or the NEA itself--as the NEA chairman did Friday--capitulate to pressures from the extreme religious right or, for fear of offending, become hesitant and cautious in selecting what they propose to produce or present with NEA funding, we will end up with standardized, homogenized art that will offend nobody. But is that the kind of art we want this country to produce? Wouldn’t you rather see something that has some kind of bite to it, art that challenges the minds of people?

If people think that inclusion of an anti-pornography clause into the grant process will make everything fine, they are living with an absolute illusion. You cannot legislate art or put controls on it any more than you can legislate the human spirit. Art takes the raw material that is life and interprets it, giving us new ways to see and hear and perceive. No artist knows for sure what the outcome will be when he or she begins to work. The artist can’t say, “This is what my painting is going to look like.” One of the very wonders of art is its unpredictability, its power to surprise, to make an original and startling statement.

In most other countries, there is a strong tradition and belief that the arts are important. For a country of our size and wealth, we, in fact, lag far behind in support of the arts. We should not be thinking about restricting the NEA, but instead thinking about how we could help it aid more artists and institutions. How shameful it would be if we succumbed to the rantings of a few and instead cut back our most creative minds and institutions.

Democracy is true to itself when it protects the arts, not when it curbs them. Stop the invasion of the artistic process and the scapegoating of American artists by opportunistic legislators seeking reelection. Stop the intimidation of our artistic institutions. Stop playing around with the nonsense of restrictive language in NEA grants and with threatening the National Endowment for the Arts itself. It is time for Congress to reauthorize the endowment for five years without restrictive clauses and to get on with the business of this country and off the backs of its artists.

Let’s put an end to this climate of fear and Philistinism. Get on with the original democratic mandate of the National Endowment for the Arts by encouraging the uncensored creation of art and its dissemination throughout the land.